I was writing up individual posts for these, but I figured it'd be best to combine them so I didn't spam your RSS Feeds. So!

More news—a post from Ghostcrawler about tanking changes, a major change to the way Battlegrounds are divided, and a cool interview with J. Allen Brack.

Read on for the breakdown, and the full blue quotes!

New Battleground Brackets

It looks like Blizzard has broken down the battlegrounds into 5 level brackets instead of 10 level. This is wonderful change—I stopped running battlegrounds at low levels when I got repeatedly told I was "dragging the team down".

The uneasy armistice between the Horde and Alliance is steadily cracking beneath the strain of Deathwing's devastating return and the Shattering of Azeroth, heralding a new era of bloody conflict.

The clash between the factions has also never been so hotly contested: Battleground brackets now match up teams more evenly. The new brackets span five levels each, except the final bracket composed of level 85 players:

Fighters can also join the battle in Arathi Basin, Eye of the Storm, and Alterac Valley at an earlier level than ever before:

Level 10 - Arathi Basin and Warsong Gulch

Level 35 - Eye of the Storm

Level 45 - Alterac Valley

Level 65 - Strand of the Ancients

Level 75 - Isle of Conquest

Level 85 - Battle for Gilneas and Twin Peaks

These changes should offer players a more consistently competitive experience in the Battlegrounds as their characters level, as well as provide for more exciting PvP conflict than ever before. Are you eager to try 35-39 Eye of the Storm? How about 45-49 Alterac Valley? Perhaps you'd like to cut your teeth on a 10-14 Arathi Basin.

Let us know what you think in the comments!

Tanking With a Vengeance

Ghostcrawler returns to give us some insight into the philosophy behind the mechanic. Basically, it's intended to to prevent the classic problem that raiders have with threat generation at higher gear levels—At 85, DPSers are gearing into higher DPS and tanks are gearing into higher survivability, which means that DPS can start to outstrip threat generation. After all, threat generation is based on damage, not survivability.

Vengeance, for those who don't have a tanking class, is a passive ability granted when you select the tanking tree, which converts damage 5% of damage taken into attack power, up to 10% of your health.

A very nice paladin player asked me recently about Vengeance. She had concerns about the mechanic, which made me realize that we haven’t done the best job of explaining to players exactly what Vengeance is supposed to accomplish.

Vengeance is a new passive ability gained by choosing one of the tanking talent trees: Protection for warriors and paladins, Blood for death knights, or Feral for druids. When a tank with one of these talent specs takes damage, she gains an attack power bonus based on the damage taken. This bonus can’t exceed 10% of her health.

Vengeance was designed for a single purpose, which is to make sure tank threat scales as other players improve their gear. Imagine a raid of reasonably geared level-85 characters. In the absence of Vengeance, the tank might generate about 50% of the damage of a DPS character. With the tank’s threat modifiers this should be sufficient for her to generate enough threat to keep her targets stuck to her (unless something unusual is going on in the encounter). The problem is that in later tiers the mages and rogues in the raid accumulate gear that continues to increase their damage, while the tank chooses gear that increases her survivability. Tanks will pick up some threat stats along the way, but as their survival is almost always a necessary condition for victory, they choose gear accordingly. In later tiers, instead of doing 50% of the damage of a DPS class, the tank might start to slip to 30% or less of a DPS character's damage. Now threat becomes an issue. Threat needs to be an important part of the game -- I’ll try to explain why we think so in a future blog. However, it isn’t our design intent for threat generation to get much harder in the third tier of content relative to the first.

So that’s what Vengeance is supposed to be. Here is what it’s not supposed to be. Vengeance is not supposed to solve the threat problem completely. A tank shouldn’t be able to just auto-attack and let Vengeance do the rest. Vengeance isn’t a replacement for the tank generating enough initial threat to get the targets to stick to her. She shouldn’t need to rely on Vengeance in the first six seconds of combat. It’s there to prevent the warlock from slowly creeping up on her threat in the middle of the fight. (If this has never happened to your raid, it’s possible that the huge threat transfer potential of the rogue Tricks of the Trade and hunter Misdirection masked how dicey threat really was for you, but those abilities were redesigned for Cataclysm.) In fact, you shouldn’t need Vengeance at all in the first couple of tiers of Cataclysm content. If a lucky dodge streak causes Vengeance to fall off, and that means that you can’t generate enough threat, then either our numbers aren’t tuned correctly, or you need to L2tank.

Vengeance also isn’t supposed to make you scared to attack a tank in PvP. Tanks have enough benefits in PvP, such as being hard to kill and control, especially in Cataclysm when Rated Battlegrounds provide them with a role where they can defend flags or towers. Players generally don’t hit hard enough to trigger the full effect of Vengeance, unless they are all ganging up on one tank, at which point someone in the group should have the ability to dispel it (Vengeance is treated as an Enrage effect for dispel purposes).

Vengeance is a new mechanic, and like many design changes, it may take some tweaking to get right. Maybe it takes too long to stack up or falls off too easily. Maybe it does too much of the tank’s job for her and ends up producing a generation of lazy tanks. Threat is a tricky thing to balance. If it’s too easy to maintain, then the tank isn’t having fun. If it’s too hard to maintain, then nobody is having fun.

Believe it or not, we want tanking to be fun.

-Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street is the Lead Systems Designer for World of Warcraft and once killed a dinosaur with a spreadsheet.

The Guardian Inteverviews J. Allen Brack

A lot of subtle, interesting insight in this one. My particular favorite is where he says, "We have started to talk about what we need to do because there's currently no conguity between the story that we are telling in Cataclysm and the one in Outland. It feels a little weird to have the whole "Deathwing is back and has destroyed the world" and then you walk into Outland and you're like "Hey! There's this guy, Illidan". We don't exactly know how we're going to tackle that yet, but we definitely want to find a solution." That's a particular issue that's always kind of bugged me, and I'm glad to see they're looking into it as well.

Which of the new features in Cataclysm are you most excited about?

Different players will be interested in different sorts of things. We've got people who have made a lot of different alts . I think for them the two new races, the worgen and the goblins, combined with the new levelling-up experience, are pretty compelling. Then, we've got people who focus on one character and don't really do alts. The levelling-up with all the new dungeons and raids and the guild achievements will probably be the thing that appeals to them.

I was going to ask about the guild achievements. Some people think it might split the big guilds or make the smaller guilds less competitive. What are you views on that?

It's interesting. I've heard both fears: that the smaller guilds might not be able to compete, and that the bigger guilds are going to split. I think it's hard to say. We did come up with what we think is a reasonable balance: our goal is definitely not to split guilds. Or have guilds at a huge competitive disadvantage.

One way we mitigate that is that there is no additional power you get from guild perks, no 1% DPS talent, additional armour or weapons. All the guild perks are convenience and/or cosmetic. Even if your guild is the biggest guild in the world or your guild is much smaller and doesn't feel it can compete. They're not really competing where it really counts which is raw player power.

World of Warcraft is now up to 12 million subscribers. Do you think that number is set to rise, or has it reached its peak? Also, which of the new features do you think will be most attractive to new or returning players?

Traditionally, we are pretty terrible at predicting what happens with subscription numbers. The thing we try to do is focus on making WoW the best that it can be, and so far that's worked pretty well for us. In terms of returning players, it goes back to what you're really interested in. The goblin race has been a hugely requested race for a long time, and I think a lot of people who played the game in the past will be interested in seeing how it's changed.

I have to say I spent some flying through the old zones and seeing all the changes has made me want to level yet more alts.

Exactly. I spent last night trying to do all the quests in Northern Barrens, and tonight I'll do some other old zones. It's pretty exciting.

You know what, it was pretty funny. There were people trying to start it back up. The funniest thing was something along the lines of: "How do I know this is the real Barrens chat?" The instant response was "Because you're talking in it, dude."

Returning to goblins and worgen, what would you say is each races unique selling point?

The idea we started out with was: "Let's do a race that actually transforms in some way". And that evolved into this idea of taking the worgen, which is a story we've wanted to tell for a really long time, and make it so that people can change between their human and worgen form. For the Alliance, they represent a bit more of a sinister race than a lot of the others. They certainly don't have the purity of the Draenei. When we were developing them we thought of them as kind of the Forsaken for the Alliance.

Exactly. They've got a little bit of a darker side and a little bit of their own agenda. They're part of the Alliance, but they still have their own demons.

Well, I'm Horde through and through, but I'll be rolling a worgen.

We had a lot of debate about which race was going to end up where. There are people who are big fans of the Alliance and people who are big fans of the Horde, and we had to think what the right thing for the game was. We ended up deciding worgen for the Alliance. As for the goblins, they've been a requested race for a long time. They're a pretty whimsical character which is another reason for doing the goblins on the Horde side. There's not a lot of whimsy on the Horde.

The Horde capital city Orgimmar has been drastically changed and many of the zones dramatically transformed. But other capital cities – Undercity, for example – and lots of other zones have remained largely untouched. Are there any chances that Deathwing might run amok again during the expansion?

(Laughs) I don't think it's likely for capital cities. One thing we wanted to do was really establish that Orgrimmar and Stormwind are the capital cities for the various factions. That's what we put a lot of energy into doing. Obviously, Orgrimmar got a huge facelift. But we put in an equal amount into Stormwind in terms of artist time. When the expansion lands, and people can fly over the city, the work will become apparent. Converting Stormwind into a flyover city was about a year of work. And about a year for Orgrimmar. So I don't think it's likely that we'll touch Undercity or any of the other cities right now.

Any plans for Outland and Northrend (zones created in the previous two expansions)?

We have started to talk about what we need to do because there's currently no conguity between the story that we are telling in Cataclysm and the one in Outland. It feels a little weird to have the whole "Deathwing is back and has destroyed the world" and then you walk into Outland and you're like "Hey! There's this guy, Illidan". We don't exactly know how we're going to tackle that yet, but we definitely want to find a solution.

The Looking for Dungeon (LFD) feature of Wrath of the Lich King was one of the expansions' highlights. Are there any plans to introduce cross-server raids?

The LFD is probably one of the things I'm most proud of. It is a true game-changer and has really done amazing things for the game. I think it's a fantastic feature and we have definitely talked about extending that to raids.

There's a couple of problems that are specific to raiding that are different to dungeons. Dungeons are far more casual in terms of the player skill you need to be successful. There's also the raid lock-out issue: how do we handle the player that you need to have in order to be successful? You do two bosses under the new system, then the raid falls apart.

There are some ideas we have. The new raid lock-out system we have would help facilitate a raid finder. I think it's possible we would do a cross-server raid system. I don't know what it would look like exactly.

Cataclysm is bringing shared loot and lock-outs between 10- and 25-man raids. Is this a continuation of Wrath of the Lich King's policy of letting the more casual player see more of the endgame? And do you intend to carry this on throughout the expansion?

Well, we've evolved the raiding philosophy with every expansion. And we've tried to make changes based on what we did before. The origin for the shared lock-out was not "Hey, let's make raiding more casual". It was actually trying to solve a couple of problems that existed with the Wrath raiding locks.

For instance, you would do your 10-person raid and then you would start working on your 10-person heroic and that was pretty challenging. Sometimes you would work for days, kind of like in the old pre-Burning Crusade days where you would spend days or weeks on a boss before you got it down. You got the boss down, you got loot, and it was an incredible feeling. Then, the next day you would get into a 25-person raid, and half of them had never been on a raid before and you'd kill the boss on the second attempt, and you would get the same loot that you'd spent days and weeks getting on your 10-person heroic.

So, while there was more players required for the 25-person version, the effort did not feel like equal work. That was really the seed of doing something different for Cataclysm. Doing the shared lock-out is our attempt to try and equalise that. The extra effort required for the 25-person version will be rewarded by giving more loot.

It's a contentious issue, and frankly, it's contentious every time. What I can say is we're going to try this and if there are problems or it's not working out the way we expect then we'll make changes.

Wrath of the Lich King brought many excellent changes like dual-speccing and the Looking for Dungeon finder we talked about. But one aspect I, and many others, didn't enjoy so much was the rise of gearscore culture. Are there plans to tackle this? Or are Blizzard happy to leave it to the players to sort out?

It's a tough issue, because you've got the people that feel like gearscore is the end-all metric of how things should work. And then you've got the unpleasant use of it, the raid or party leader who says "People without gearscore x cannot enter this raid/party. I'm not going to play with people of that gearscore." It's definitely a issue.

Our feeling is that that proverbial horse has left the barn. And there's really no way to put that genie back in the bottle. So the question is: what do we do about it? It's not nearly the resolution of the add-on, but to have our own gearscore helps bucket people of similar gearscores together, so that there is not the huge disparity between the haves and the have-nots.

Comments

Comment by rga7

I'm now soooo not going to bgs. When the brackets 50-59 where not used, what about 50-54 and 55-59? Who will use them?

Comment by Glom

on 2010-12-01T14:28:07-06:00

I'm now soooo not going to bgs. When the brackets 50-59 where not used, what about 50-54 and 55-59? Who will use them?

Perhaps you haven't heard. Blizz combined ALL the battlegroups. So I highly doubt you'll have any issues filling a battleground anymore.

-Edit In addition to combining the battlegroups they've allowed low level players to queue for random BGs so if just 20 players in the WHOLE world queue for a random at the level 50-54 bracket, you're going to get a battle.

Comment by Kiayateo

on 2010-12-01T14:31:54-06:00

I like the idea of having more battlegrounds sooner. I was getting so sick of running WG and AB so much until level 51. Should be a bit more interesting now.

Edit: I was kind of hoping there would be an 80-84 Battle for Gilneas and Twin Peaks though, so I could experience them before 85.

Comment by pallylock

on 2010-12-01T14:42:42-06:00

I like everything about the new lockout system except for the fact that I get to raid a maximum of one progression raid per week. Whereas in the old system I could raid progression with my guild in 25s, and then my less experienced friend could ask "Hey wanna help my less progressed guild do 10 man content?" or "Hey wanna set up a 10 man pug?" Obviously 2 raids a week is very time consuming, and in Wrath after I had cleared some of the initial bosses in a raid I did the 10 mans less. But unfortunately with this new system I'm going to need an alt if I want to get some extra raid time in. Although with the equal loot I can see where 2 separate lockouts could become problematic.

Comment by Stefanish

on 2010-12-01T14:54:24-06:00

Really good interview, specially the last questions

Comment by deathcabby

on 2010-12-01T15:00:47-06:00

I like everything about the new lockout system except for the fact that I get to raid a maximum of one progression raid per week. Whereas in the old system I could raid progression with my guild in 25s, and then my less experienced friend could ask "Hey wanna help my less progressed guild do 10 man content?" or "Hey wanna set up a 10 man pug?" Obviously 2 raids a week is very time consuming, and in Wrath after I had cleared some of the initial bosses in a raid I did the 10 mans less. But unfortunately with this new system I'm going to need an alt if I want to get some extra raid time in. Although with the equal loot I can see where 2 separate lockouts could become problematic.

But the other side of it was that it was expected that you raided 10 mans and 25 mans to gear up quicker to help your progression. With the extra time from not having to do 2 raids every week on my main (4 raids during ToC), I can level up an alt pretty quickly to run raids with friends, if I choose to do so. Less commitment makes me happy! :)

Comment by belpolaris

on 2010-12-01T15:10:03-06:00

It might work out better with the new changes to the leveling course. Plus since the BGs are queue-able remotely you can be questing while you wait.

Comment by Shigy

on 2010-12-01T16:55:04-06:00

Loving the new battleground level splits. Unless you were a class that had its abilities from the start of the level bracket it used to be right get to within a couple of levels of max then do PvP. Now its right I feel like PvP lets go. Even at the lowest level you can make a difference.

Comment by Ruhig

on 2010-12-01T20:25:55-06:00

Vengeance as an Enrage effect is a very clever solution for PvP. A good Tranquilizing Shot from a hunter should eliminate it, and other classes also have similar dispels, so it shouldn't be a problem (unless people just need to Learn2PvP)...

Comment by Aestu

on 2010-12-01T20:47:46-06:00

The Looking for Dungeon (LFD) feature of Wrath of the Lich King was one of the expansions' highlights. Are there any plans to introduce cross-server raids?The LFD is probably one of the things I'm most proud of. It is a true game-changer and has really done amazing things for the game. I think it's a fantastic feature and we have definitely talked about extending that to raids.

There's a couple of problems that are specific to raiding that are different to dungeons. Dungeons are far more casual in terms of the player skill you need to be successful. There's also the raid lock-out issue: how do we handle the player that you need to have in order to be successful? You do two bosses under the new system, then the raid falls apart.There are some ideas we have. The new raid lock-out system we have would help facilitate a raid finder. I think it's possible we would do a cross-server raid system. I don't know what it would look like exactly.

Wrath of the Lich King brought many excellent changes like dual-speccing and the Looking for Dungeon finder we talked about. But one aspect I, and many others, didn't enjoy so much was the rise of gearscore culture. Are there plans to tackle this? Or are Blizzard happy to leave it to the players to sort out?

It's a tough issue, because you've got the people that feel like gearscore is the end-all metric of how things should work. And then you've got the unpleasant use of it, the raid or party leader who says "People without gearscore x cannot enter this raid/party. I'm not going to play with people of that gearscore." It's definitely a issue.

Our feeling is that that proverbial horse has left the barn. And there's really no way to put that genie back in the bottle. So the question is: what do we do about it? It's not nearly the resolution of the add-on, but to have our own gearscore helps bucket people of similar gearscores together, so that there is not the huge disparity between the haves and the have-nots.

Contrary to what some people believe, Blizzard does in fact have people who do not understand the game they design.

And no, there's no contradiction in that; it's called hubris, many big companies have the same thing, and in time they destroy themselves.

Comment by budgie

on 2010-12-01T20:53:31-06:00

terrible brackets. Glad I don't have any low levels but that is just dumb.

Comment by NeoBlackheart

on 2010-12-02T00:30:50-06:00

I'm now soooo not going to bgs. When the brackets 50-59 where not used, what about 50-54 and 55-59? Who will use them?

Just qued on my 54 NE mage and it took me a total of omg I hit the button and I got a que. then I leveled and it did the same in 55-59 there is no worry,

Comment by wimbo125

on 2010-12-02T04:13:42-06:00

Really happy with this interview, as soon as people read this they won't change their small guilds for bigger guilds, im in a guild with 146 chars (which comes around at 60 people) and after i read this interview i thought 'Hey, now i know i dont have to go to that 650+ char guild to Pwn some dragons or something'. Thank you Blizzard!

Comment by Vaeku

on 2010-12-02T04:16:20-06:00

Glad that they made the new brackets. Always said that this is what they should do so that the level 10s and such could have a chance. And since all of the battlegroups are combined for BGs, it shouldn't be a problem to find people.

Although having Eye of the Storm at 35 is just... weird. I could understand AV, but EotS?

Comment by Kruga

on 2010-12-02T04:49:09-06:00

if just 20 players in the WHOLE world region queue for a random at the level 50-54 bracket, you're going to get a battle.

fixed that for you.

Also

-Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street is the Lead Systems Designer for World of Warcraft and once killed a dinosaur with a spreadsheet.

Ghostcrawler is just that awesome!

Comment by Carukia

on 2010-12-02T12:32:23-06:00

terrible brackets. Glad I don't have any low levels but that is just dumb.

I would love to hear why you feel this way because, for the life of me, I can't think of a single reason this would be considered a negative.

Edit: I can think of a reason now and I suppose there are a lot of people that would feel the same, no matter how selfish and idiotic it is.

Comment by Carukia

on 2010-12-02T12:37:04-06:00

Contrary to what some people believe, Blizzard does in fact have people who do not understand the game they design.

And no, there's no contradiction in that; it's called hubris, many big companies have the same thing, and in time they destroy themselves.

I understand the thought process behind your statement, but I completely disagree with your conclusion. However, I don't like to argue with brick walls, so I won't. Carry on.

Comment by boulderfish

on 2010-12-03T08:09:55-06:00

I think the new BG brackets are great. I, for one, wouldn't even bother BG'ing at the lower half of the 10-level bracket, since it was less fun for me and for the rest of the raid. The new brackets will bring me and other players in at any level. More players queueing for BG's will counteract the effect of needing twice as many queues. Also, once region-wide battlegroups are implemented, I expect that BG queue times will drop anyway.

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